Contemporary Laboratory: Silent Walk with Vivian Caccuri. Rio De Janeiro, December 10 2014. Photo: Jessica Gogan.

House 5 – Poetics of the Encounter/Encounter of Poetics

Michel Schettert and Rafa Éis

When artists from different languages get together in a research laboratory to investigate the possibilities of contemporary art, the consequences involve fusion experiments: the laboratory provides the necessary drugs – music, dance, painting, theatre, literature, photography, graffiti, poetry, sewing, performance, video – and the researchers test the combinations, inside and outside the laboratory. Exchanging hypothesis becomes an inevitable process in which the artists look for reinventing themselves in order to produce in groups. The blend of subjectivities results in works that are created in a hybrid field.

From the Contemporary Laboratory emerged ways of “making together” – in addition to the collaborations in Look, Imagine, Listen, Feel – that exceeded the experimental program in which we were immersed: alliances to collectively think and create, small groups to formalize ideas that would not have been possible working alone.

Michel Schettert
The video Bangu was recorded in the neighborhood of the same name in Rio de Janeiro. Filmed together with Felipe Nunes, it distances itself from the documentary format, at the same time it gets close to a language that is based on my research for dance videos. The motivation for the video came from Felipe, after he watched my dance video Yaras. The experimental language awakened Felipe’s will of producing something that could relate his urban art to the video. To this idea, I added the nocturnal visuality of the neighborhood and the musicality of Umbanda (Felipe’s religion), searching for a dialogue between body, space and time. The video starts in Bangu and goes into the night, passing through the time of the paintings until dawn, always encountering the characteristic happenings of the streets.

Among the improvisations of the Lab’s immersive experience, the dancer Henrique Castro did something that impacted me: he confused/fused the time for writing with the time for dancing. That’s how I got the idea of making this dance video. After watching the improvisation material, both artists went back to the room and created the dance video Gallery 17.

Rafa Éis
The piece Trabalho (Work) had been in the works prior to the Contemporary Laboratory. It became real through the collaboration of Jandir Jr. A performance action to be done in a public space, the action happened through the distribution of leaflets, and when I heard this was a strategy of great interest to Jandir, too – Clube do Silêncio (Silence Club) – I invited him to collaborate by capturing images on video. On October 30, 2014 we went to Largo do Machado, an urban square, a true microcosm in the south zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Amidst talking about ways of presenting and sharing art, I could count on the perspective of this friend and artist I admire. Luan Machado also joined us that morning.

About Clube do silêncio

Trabalho can be seen at: